Keepers of the House

by JH Fletcher

  From the first he’d had an eye for a story, for a picture, but the business was littered with the bodies of people just as good, technically speaking, as Mark Forrest. What you needed in this game was a blood-and-guts determination to get to the top. If he had got there, it was because Anna had ditched him, all those years ago. At the time it had seemed like the end of the world but he’d been furious, too, thank God, and that had saved him. He had been so determined to prove to her — and to himself — that he was good for something that he had been like a shark scenting blood in the water. Instant attack.

  Now here they were again, facing each other across the lunch table, and it was even possible to believe they were still as they’d been fifteen years before when the phone had rung in his Cape Town office, and a voice had told him that Shongwe wanted to see her again, after all.

  He didn’t want her to go, certainly not alone, but the messenger was quite specific.

  ‘By herself. No one else, or there’s no deal.’

  ‘I shall need to be there, too.’

  Shongwe, it seemed, did not agree. Anna — alone — or nothing.

  Madness. When she got back from Oudekraal, Mark told her so but Anna, it seemed, did not agree either.

  ‘The whole point of my coming to Africa was to meet people like Shongwe.’

  Mark had hoped there might have been other reasons but for the moment was willing to put that thought on hold.

  ‘I don’t think you understand what you’re getting into.’

  Her face was flushed, her eyes unfriendly. ‘But I’m sure you’re going to tell me.’

  ‘Shongwe is an indicted criminal. It’s an offence to have anything to do with him.’

  ‘I seem to remember you introduced us.’

  In reality it was not the authorities who worried Mark. The worst they could do was chuck Anna in jail or, more probably, out of the country. They certainly wouldn’t kill her. Shongwe’s mates were a different matter altogether: cut your throat as soon as look at you and not too fussy about the colour of it, either. Not the types to be chivalrous because they were dealing with a woman — quite the opposite, in fact.

  He tried to tell her this, but she wasn’t interested.

  ‘Why should he want to kill me? He won’t get anything out of that. Quite the opposite. And you said yourself that I needed an African point of view.’

  Yes. But I never meant you to go in there by yourself.

  Mark couldn’t bring himself to say it, knowing how she would react.

  I want protection, mate, I’ll ask for it.

  The fact was that, despite all her visits to Oudekraal, Anna still had something of the stereotyped vision she had brought with her from Australia: black was beautiful, white ugly. Mark had no patience with blinkered attitudes, in Anna or anyone else. Of all continents, Africa was no place for bleeding hearts. Of course, some blacks were beautiful, some whites ugly, but the reverse was equally true. He had seen what some blacks had done to their own kind: necklaced men, beaten and disembowelled women, the stench of blood in the African air. What had happened in Guguletu was still fresh in his mind, too. For the rest of his life, he would suffer nightmares of fleeing frantically through the streets and alleyways with those tsotsis after him, knowing what they would do to him if they caught up.

  Anna had also been in Guguletu, but what she had seen there had only reinforced her prejudices. Now there was no stopping her.

  ‘I’m going, and that’s an end to it.’

  And did so: alone, as ordered, while Mark gnawed his fingernails down to his armpits, waiting for her to come back.

  An hour, she had told him. Maybe two.

  That had been shortly after midday. The hour passed. The second hour. Three o’clock. Four o’clock.

  Bloody hell.

  He didn’t know what to do. The police were out of the question. He rang his contacts. Nobody knew anything.

  He waited.

  Five o’clock. Six.

  He decided he’d give her until dark. If she wasn’t back by then … But what could he do? Bringing the cops into it would mean serious trouble all round. Worse, it would be certain to make things even more dangerous for Anna than they were already.

  So in the end he did nothing, mooching round and round the cottage, watching the clock and imagining …

  Rape, torment, death.

  She came back at nine o’clock, to his unspeakable relief and monumental fury.

  ‘What the hell have you been doing?’

  She was having none of that. ‘Making up my mind about sanctions. What you wanted, isn’t it?’

  It had been what he wanted, but he hadn’t expected her to take half the bloody night to do it.

  ‘What took so long?’

  ‘Talking. Seeing things.’

  ‘What sort of things?’

  He had been frightened for her, but there was more to his anger than that and she spotted it at once. It made her clam up. She still answered his questions but made sure she told him nothing.

  Two children, slapping each other with words.

  ‘Where did you go?’

  ‘What took you so long?’

  ‘Whom did you see?’

  Nagging and nagging, unable to leave it alone.

  And she, battle flags painted on her cheeks.

  ‘I told you. All sorts of places.’

  ‘You can’t rush these things.’

  ‘Adam’s mates.’ Her eyes dared him.

  Adam. That was the crux of it. Both of them knew it.

  She said, ‘You don’t own me, you know.’

  ‘What about sanctions? Have you decided?’

  Even that she would not tell him. ‘Jack Goodie makes the decisions. All I do is give him the facts.’

  Lying in bed, back turned ostentatiously to back, the darkness spiked with resentment.

  Mark thought, She’s done it to get back at me. Because of what happened after the riot. Then I left her standing; now it’s her turn.

  Yet he could not be sure whether he was right or not. Uncertainty fueled rage. There had been a time, shortly before their break-up, when he might have lifted his fists to Mary-Lou Aspinall and her smart mouth. Indifference had saved him; he hadn’t cared enough to bother.

  This time he cared.

  Adam’s mates.

  The next day was no better. Then, suddenly, it was much worse.

  A newsflash from the Ministry of the Interior. A series of raids in Guguletu. A number of suspected activists had been arrested. There followed a list of names. Mark ran his eye down it. Shongwe’s name was not there but there were several that he recognised. One in particular. Abraham Qwele, the headmaster who had saved his life.

  No tennis this week.

  He had hardly finished reading the announcement when he heard the klaxon. He looked out of his office window in time to see the Landrover draw up outside the building. Painted yellow, like they all were, with the blue logo of the South African police. It was hard to think of anything more damaging to the country’s image than to run in a member of the international press corps, but you could never underestimate the stupidity of the authorities in a police state. He was fully prepared to be carted off when the two cops — one of them his old mate Scholtz from Guguletu — came marching into his office. Then it turned out that they hadn’t come to arrest him, after all. Just, as Scholtz put it, to have a chat.

  They — or Anna — had led the police straight to the black activists. Not deliberately, of course. After Mark’s disappearing act during the riot and the business of the film, they’d staked out the cottage. All they’d had to do when Anna left was follow her and observe while she met Shongwe’s messenger. After that, it had been easy.

  ‘What was she doing in Guguletu?’

  ‘You’ll have to ask her.’

  ‘We’re asking you.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘What is Miss Riordan doing in South Africa?’

  ‘On holiday.’

/>   ‘She works for a leading Australian politician.’

  ‘So?’

  They got nothing, would get nothing. Anna wasn’t the only one who knew how to dodge questions.

  She would have to be warned, all the same; Scholtz said as much.

  ‘We don’t care how well connected Miss Riordan is. We do not wish to cause her embarrassment but will not permit her to flout our laws with impunity. When is she planning to go back to Australia?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I would suggest sooner rather than later. As for you —’

  ‘Yes?’

  Scholtz wagged a finger under Mark’s nose. ‘Be very careful.’

  ‘Sooner rather than later,’ said Anna. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘It means tomorrow.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘They’ll deport you, if they have to.’

  She looked at him, suddenly helpless. ‘What do I do?’

  From his closed face she saw that, for the moment at least, she had lost him.

  ‘Shove off back to Canberra,’ he told her. ‘Why not? You’ve got what you came for.’

  A response to rattle teeth; yet, even now, Anna was willing to make one more try. ‘You know sanctions were only part of it …’

  A forlorn offer, which he ignored.

  ‘Abraham Qwele was one of the people they picked up. The schoolmaster. The bloke who saved my neck.’

  ‘It wasn’t my fault!’ Furiously she spat the words at him.

  ‘I never said it was.’

  But his tone had said it, and both of them knew it.

  It was terrible. What they’d had so briefly together had been beautiful and full of light, like a crystal vase. So precious. She had begun to believe — had even convinced herself that he, too, had believed — that it might be the real thing at last. No longer. Now the vase had fallen and lay in pieces about them.

  Anna managed to book a flight for the following day. SAA to Johannesburg and Harare, QANTAS to Perth, Sydney and, at last, Canberra. A God-awful hike.

  Mark ran her to the airport. It was a frosty time. She tried desperately to think of what she could say to put things right, knowing that if she couldn’t come up with the right words before she left it would be too late. Distance and hurt and anger would bury them.

  She could think of nothing. Instead could read Mark’s mind so clearly, see what she knew he was seeing.

  The black body humped, back tight with muscle. The heavy arms supporting. The tang of sweat. The vision all the more painful because the man was black and therefore alien. The difference in pigment meant the man himself was different, other than human. She saw herself in Mark’s imagination. Flung carelessly, profligate limbs sprawled wide. Crying rapturously into the black and sweating face. His sweat mingling with her own. His semen … She knew that Mark would not permit himself to think of the dark, potent semen. But his subconscious would have thought of it, oh yes.

  What in fact had happened between Shongwe and herself was irrelevant. Mark had become a prisoner of his own imagination.

  For her part …

  Sanctions were only part of it.

  It was the best she could do. It was not enough, without further explanation they were doomed, yet she found she was incapable of saying more. She was not accountable to Mark Forrest for her actions but his pain was mirrored by her own. He no longer trusted her and, without trust, they were nothing.

  They parted at the airport. Their expressionless faces were like twin blades, cutting each other. They were joined by their determination to be apart.

  On the long flight eastwards, Anna sat back in her business-class seat. She thought, So now I, too, have been forced out of South Africa, one jump ahead of the police. In their book I am guilty of a crime, as Anneliese, seventy-nine years ago, was also guilty.

  TWELVE

  As the days passed some of the colour came back into Anneliese’s face. Each night, before they slept, Elizabeth reported to Deneys on his sister’s progress. How each day she seemed better. Still nothing much to say for herself but, with patience and time, she would recover. Elizabeth was sure of it.

  ‘She’s eating well,’ she said. ‘You see how her face is beginning to fill out again?’

  ‘I was thinking the same thing.’

  Meaningless words, spoken to comfort. Watching Anneliese, Deneys saw only the darkness, remembered still the chuckling laugh. Yet hoped Elizabeth was right, that miracles might prove to be possible after all.

  ‘I was afraid she might blame me,’ Elizabeth said, ‘for having been born British.’

  The thought had troubled him, too. He remembered how Dominic Riordan had accused him, the day he had spoken of Sarel Henning, but it seemed Anneliese had said nothing.

  ‘Let us be thankful for that, at least.’

  ‘You’ll see,’ she told him. ‘Things will work out.’

  It seemed too much to believe, yet that night Deneys slept with a lighter heart. Reason denied it but Elizabeth’s words had re-awoken hope.

  In Anneliese’s mind, still entangled with the past, there was little room for hope.

  Death trotting up the winding path from Lydenburg; the bay horse with tossing head, the grave face of the bearded man, the glitter of sunlight on the ammunition belts across his chest as he told her of her husband’s dying.

  The pulsing eagerness of flame, devouring her home, her life. The dead weight of what had been a child borne in her arms to the expectant earth.

  No, she had no feelings to spare for the valley or anyone in it. At times she thought how easy it would be to hate them all with their smugness, their easy talk of forgiving. Bring them the fire, she thought. Bring the flies and open graves. Then let them talk, these strangers whom I used to know.

  Every day when she awoke, her first awareness of daylight was overwhelmed at once by her sense of loss and disbelief. Of hatred, too, and an implacable anger. Yet time diminished even that. Little by little, she started to remember the things she had forgotten. The lanes joining the farms along which she had run so often as a child; the fields where they had played beneath willow trees that still trailed their green fingers in the river; the circle of mountains, peaks white with snow until well into spring, where occasionally Christiaan had taken them when he went hunting. She remembered her breath smoking in the cold air, the soapy smoothness of the saddle leather, the tumbled wildness of the kloofs, the narrow valleys where they hunted duiker and other antelope and — once — a leopard that had been preying on the flocks. The harshness of its pelt, the pattern of rosettes flattening beneath her hand. The long body stretched upon the stony ground, the dark lips snarling in death, the great incisors that could rip open an antelope. Or a man.

  So many memories.

  Each day she walked or drove alone through the valley. How much she wished she could return to those days of childhood, not to erase what had happened since but to regain the sense of belonging that she had known in those days, the knowledge that this was her place.

  It was impossible. Nothing in the valley had changed; quite possibly nothing ever would, but that made no difference. The change was in herself. She no longer accepted what the people hereabouts held as an article of faith, that nothing beyond their ring of mountains mattered or even existed. Even Deneys, who had fought all through the war, had become infected by it. For him, the past was a book with its cover firmly closed. Anneliese’s book remained open, its pages stained in blood.

  All the same, there were one or two changes since she had left as a bride nine years before. Old Isaak Kok had died and his widow had sold the store. A man called Henning owned it now. A good man, she was told, with a wife and two children. Brave, too; she heard all about the dramatic rescue of Hendricks’s wife and child from the flood.

  There was another stranger, also, an Irishman from — of all places — Australia. Even Deneys, who had known him in the war, didn’t know what he was doing in the valley. Would have wished him gone,
she suspected, and with reason. He shamed them all, living at Amsterdam in a tumbledown cottage that even a coloured man would have refused, and sleeping, rumour said, with little Miriam Plaatjies. No doubt he was not the first, but that was not the point. His offence was to do openly what a lot of other men had done only in secret. Hypocritical, perhaps, but the conventions had to be observed.

  Except that since the war Anneliese no longer had time for convention. On the contrary — how shocked Deneys would have been had he known it — she was fascinated by the idea of a man, a stranger at that, who not only broke the rules but got away with it. So one day, when she was out for a drive and saw a strange white man walking towards her, she reined in and spoke to him.

  He was civil enough and soon they were chatting as though they’d known each other for years. For the first time she heard how he had visited Uitkyk with Deneys.

  ‘There was a broken doll,’ he said. ‘I mind it well.’

  ‘There is no one to miss it now.’

  She spoke calmly, judiciously, as though the loss of a child or two were of little consequence and, if his words had once again ripped open her unhealed flesh, there was no one to know but herself. Yet somehow he must have read Anneliese’s thoughts. He reached up to her in the little Cape cart and placed his hands over hers.

  ‘I pray they will die in torment.’

  No need to ask whom he meant.

  ‘It will take more than prayer,’ she told him.

  ‘A great deal more.’

  ‘And a target.’

  They were speaking the secret language that only survivors of the war could have understood. It gave her a wonderful sense of release, that here was someone — at last — who had not forgotten, who understood that the war would never be over.

  ‘I know where there’s a target,’ he said.

  Anneliese felt her face go white. ‘Where?’